


The Morning of the End of the World

by Quillori



Category: Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:33:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28142433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/pseuds/Quillori
Summary: "The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs. Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living species existed to cast any doubts."
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Morning of the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fontainebleau](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/gifts).



> End notes contain Calvino's original description of the city of Theodora

“There is absolutely nothing there. There can’t be anything there.”

Tueve Dorika (second assistant librarian at the medical wing of the Theodora City Library) raised his hands placatingly, and tried to indicate that there was no point in shouting at him. He wasn’t the one claiming to see things. He was quite prepared to agree there was nothing in the stacks but shelves and books! No need to convince him, particularly at that volume. 

Two reading desks away, Dr Fedia Toshe straightened her notes and tried to radiate pointed though silent disapproval at people who were not silent. Some sort of hysterical reaction, perhaps, or an hallucination? Unless the man was drunk. In any case, neither hysteria nor hallucination were her field, and she did not see why she should be forcibly interested in them at a place specifically designed to be quiet and orderly. Why couldn’t he go shout somewhere else?

— — — _earlier that morning_ — — —

It was an hour past cock-crow (not that there were any cocks to crow, but the name lived on, a fading idiom that even now hardly recalled a bird, lively and vicious and loud, and would one day be no more than a synonym for dawn). Indeed, Tueve thought, most people (himself included) knew a rooster’s crow only from novelty clocks, painted with improbable designs (had any bird truly looked that like? Indeed, no one design was much like another, the bird red, or white, or brown, or black, or multi-coloured, the only commonality an improbable crown and an obscure and pointless decoration hanging below the beak, as though the bird were carrying a bag.) Perhaps one day it would be the regular word for sunrise, its etymology traced back to a type of clock kept by the bed to provide a morning alarm, and beyond that unknown.

Morning was a good time for such thoughts, and Tueve liked to lie in bed, letting his mind run lightly from one subject to another, stopping lightly as it pleased and then flitting away again (like a butterfly! That was another of them - perhaps someone should write a book, record such things carefully, so that future etymologists should understand what had been meant? But no, there would always be traders, and diplomats, and wanderers, coming to Theodora from elsewhere; indeed there was no bar on citizens travelling themselves if they so wished. Surely it would always be easy to find a real hen, or a real butterfly, or at least someone who had seen one.)

Or would everywhere else gradually grow to be like Theodora? Certainly it was more comfortable now, and safer, and he himself had little wish to face the discomfort of travelling merely for the novelty of being bitten by flies and seeing roaches run across his food. Carefully preserved farms might survive, he supposed, since they were necessary, with farmers well paid to compensate for the hardships of their life. Yes, even if he had little wish to travel outside his city, he wished suddenly he could travel to its future, to see its gleaming streets, hear the novel phrases of a people who could not even remember birdsong, see the fashions and designs of art which longer imitated nature. (He had seen a book, once, of designs from some foreign country, all repeating patterns and intricate work like lace made of iron. Perhaps it would be like that.)

It was now, unfortunately, an hour and a half past cock-crow (or dawn or sunrise or daybreak), and whatever wonders the distant future might hold, the immediate future held an embarrassing conversation about why he had been late for work three times in the last eight days, so Tueve had to abandon dreams of shifting fractals and strange tessellations in a mad dash to wash and breakfast and dress and leave in absolutely no time at all.

— — — 

It had rained sometime in the past few hours, and now in the grey light of dawn the streets were silver. The buildings, at first only blotches of darker blackness, came gradually into focus, developed edges and windows, arches and doors, straight lines and careful, precise curves developing out of the smudgy darkness of a cloudy, starless night, marking the order and progression of day.

It was Fedia’s favourite time, and though she allowed the general belief she rose so early because she was such a dedicated scholar, keen to fit in a few hours private study before she must attend the hospital, in truth she rose early mostly because she loved walking the streets while they were quiet and monochrome, almost empty of people.

— — — 

He was, in the end, only a little late. He might not have been late at all if he hadn’t stopped at the clockmaker’s shop, peering at the grand display, as he did almost every morning. But how could he pass it by without a glance? So many gears, each shaped and filed to perfection, so that one fit with the next, and the whole thing turned perfectly, marking out the hours in an endless circular procession.

— — — 

The doors of the library were beautifully carved: 24 panels, each depicting some scene from the city’s history. Later in the day, they’d be surrounded by children, who loved to look at the animals: the writhing snakes, the great wings of the condors, the tiny, detailed moths; to a child, even the rats were cute. Fedia always walked quickly past the doors, not sparing them a glance. (She had seen, once, a child who had not been quick enough, arms and face half gnawed away. There had been others, too: the elderly, the sick, the drunk, but it was the child she remembered. She would have preferred to use one of the side doors, but that early in the morning, only the main door was in use.)

The library itself was beautifully orderly, its wings radiating from a central lobby, each reading room equipped with neat rows of desks, the attendants passing smoothly to and fro, laden with books, from shelves to desks and back, in an endless steady pattern, knowledge like blood coursing through a body. 

The fancy pleased her, the library as a living thing, almost human. Something that must be cared for and protected, so it ran well and properly. She had liked to see how things worked, how they could be repaired and made to work better, since she was a child herself. (No surprise, perhaps: it was in her blood, her father and her father’s father clockmakers, precise and careful, measuring the world in neatly cogged intervals.) What was a body but a more complicated mechanism? More precious, more difficult to understand, harder to heal, but there was no difference, really, between a shattered leg and a snapped spring. Each needed to be fixed neatly, with care and patience. If she dreamed at all, Fedia dreamed of a future where no clock would be broken beyond repair.

— — — 

It was an article of unquestioned faith to Tueve that all things could be preserved in books. Lists and facts and observations, of course, and theories and processes and the careful learning of the wise, but sunsets, too, and the smell of candles as they were snuffed, the taste of his sister’s pies, the lullaby his mother sang. What else was poetry for?

Just as cockerels, long since banished beyond the city limits, were preserved in language like flies in amber (once living things, now turned to useful stone, polished and beautiful and only recognisable if you looked closely), just so could the feel of snow in the air at the start of winter, the best way to grind glass for lenses, the sweep of history and the daily doings of the city council, be all alike bound neatly into books. And if the pages sometimes faded, well, it was always possible to copy and reprint them. Nothing need ever be lost.

— — — 

There was more shouting now, other voices joining in, the sound of chairs hastily pushed back. Something more than one idiot disturbing the solemn peace of the library. Fedia sighed and turned, ready to offer practical assistance, and saw … she had never truly understood the term wonder before. She had thought she had, of course, when she saw the way veins and arteries interconnected, the way flesh could knit itself back to health, the perfectly crafted structure of the human hand. But that had been admiration, curiosity, a pleasure in well made things. This, in this moment: creatures melded together in ways impossible, feline and aquiline, fur and feathers and scales all mixed impossibly together, a single, central horn, and tail with its own hissing head. It was something strange and terrible, beautiful in its impossibility, in its destruction of every category she thought she understood.

— — — 

Tueve, more practical than he had ever realised, saw teeth and claws and fangs. Very possibly the creatures were beautiful, but that was not their essential feature in relation to him. He ran.

— — — _the first morning after the end of the world_ — — —

It had rained during the night, and the streets were like silver, like moonlight across the waves, and the dragons writhed through them, their scales shining like pearls. Huge talons curled round the edges of roofs, crumbling them, the hunched shapes of a dozen harpies, a hundred harpies, lining buildings that had once been flocked with pigeons. A white goat with golden horns and a white horse with a fish’s tooth pawed the ground (cracking cobblestones, tearing the road back down to the bare earth), tossing their heads with their impossible horns, gathering strength to charge each other. Somewhere unnoticed in a doorway a little snake, winged, white crowned, looked to the lightening sky, and raising its head (bird-beaked but venomous), crowed to the dawning day. 

**Author's Note:**

> "Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it.
> 
> But first, for many long years, it was uncertain whether or not the final victory would not go to the last species left to fight man's possession of the city: the rats. From each generation of rodents that the people managed to exterminate, the few survivors gave birth to a tougher progeny, invulnerable to traps and resistant to all poison. In the space of a few weeks, the sewers of Theodora were repopulated with hordes of spreading rats. At last, with an extreme massacre, the murderous, versatile ingenuity of mankind defeated the overweening life-force of the enemy.
> 
> The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs. Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living species existed to cast any doubts. To recall what had been fauna, Theodora's library would preserve on its shelves the volumes of Buffon and Linnaeus.
> 
> At least that is what Theodora's inhabitants believed, far from imagining that a forgotten fauna was stirring from its lethargy. Relegated for long eras to remote hiding places, ever since it had been deposed by the system of nonextinct species, the other fauna was coming back to the light from the library's basements where the incunabula were kept; it was leaping from the capitals and drainpipes, perching at the sleepers' bedside. Sphinxes, griffons, chimeras, dragons, hircocervi, harpies, hydras, unicorns, basilisks were resuming possession of their city."


End file.
